From Guests and Guides to Collaborators: Negotiating Roles in Design and Biology Collaborations

Abstract

In recent years, the design community has started envisioning biology as a design medium and designers are entering laboratories to pursue designer-biologist collaborations. To ensure that these collaborations lead to rich outcomes, we need to better understand the roles performed by biologists and designers in these collaborations. In seven case studies of collaborations between designers and biologists, we found that strong role dynamics appeared during the collaboration and can be divided into four phases: discovering, defining, developing and delivering. We show how biologists successively act as guides, influencers, supervisors and librarians while designers act as visitors, apprentices, amateurs and lone makers. We found that, despite their interdisciplinarity, projects followed traditional design project structures. While biologists tended to take the lead on project content, designers framed the projects using their methods and processes.

Keywords:

• collaborative design
• design practice
• interdisciplinarity
• bio-design

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dan Grushkin for his helpful comments and English revisions as well as all the biologists and designers who participated in this project. The two authors share first authorship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data (Appendix A) for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2020.1762339.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University Paris Diderot; Ecole Boulle; SCIRE Association as well as JSPS FY2017 Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Marguerite Benony

Marguerite Benony is a third year PhD student at University Paris Diderot. She was trained as a designer from Ecole Boulle and ENS Cachan. Her PhD project deals with designing the future of research and of laboratories in life sciences.

Nolwenn Maudet

Nolwenn Maudet is an interaction designer and a design researcher at the Université de Strasbourg. She obtained her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Paris-Saclay. As a design researcher, she studies how designers work with their digital tools and with other communities of practice.